


ACOA

by therudestflower



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, Not the big one, adult children of alcoholics, mild season 4 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 23:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19982116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therudestflower/pseuds/therudestflower
Summary: She knew--mostly from Lilly--that Logan’s mother was an alcoholic, and she knew that he knew about her mom. But they’d never sat cross-legged on the carpet and exchanged stories about Mom driving home drunk from a 4:00 soccer practice, or pulling out the recycling to count bottles.





	ACOA

“I see you’re cheating on me with Mac,” Veronica floated over dinner. 

She’d come home to find Mac on the couch, holding Logan’s phone. She greeted Veronica before standing up and saying, “Let me know if it gives you any trouble,” and walking out their door. Veronica followed her out. Before she could say a word, Mac held up her hands in surrender. “He asked for my help, so I helped him. I gotta go. I’m late for a meeting.” 

“You caught me,” Logan said evenly, “we were going at it like bunnies when you got here. Terrible timing, by the way, I didn’t even get to finish. I’ll have to slip out under the pretense of taking Pony for a walk or my chi is going to be off all week.” 

“Mac took your right hand with her?”

“You really underestimate my creativity,” Logan quipped. 

Veronica didn’t actually believe Logan was sleeping with Mac, but she couldn’t think of a single good reason she’d be here just to see him. Logan had gotten better at talking to the 7,550,262,090 people he didn’t protect fiercely. Even if Mac wasn’t inner inner circle, Logan was friendly enough with her, but not friendly enough to make playdates without her. 

“So Mac--”

“She was setting something up on my phone,” Logan said, getting up and taking his dishes with him. 

“Oh honey,” Veronica said, picking up her plate and following him into the kitchen, “I could have shown you how to get to the really good porn sites.” 

“Such wit,” Logan said, but he didn’t follow up with a further comeback. 

Veronica waited. Porn jokes were so rife with potential and after sitting on a stakeout all day, it was all she wanted. “Okay, so you are cheating on me?” 

Logan sighed and picked up his plate off the counter. In her mind, Veronica imagined him slamming it on the counter and it shattering into pieces, but he just pulled the dishwasher open and started loading it. “I’m not sleeping with Mac.”

“Well--”

“I’m sleeping with Wallace.” 

Okay, maybe she would do the plate slamming. “I just want to know why she was here.” 

“I can’t have a friend whose military service number I don’t have memorized?”

“Please.”

“She was here to set up something on my phone,” Logan repeated, “Security measures you can’t get in the app store.” 

Veronica’s mind flashed to the dusty blue car that used to lurk outside their apartment until she paid them a friendly visit one night. “You have another stalker?” 

Logan smiled, “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” 

Veronica nodded solemnly, “I haven’t tased anyone in days.” 

Out of dishes to load, Logan turned around and reached for her hair, “Some stuff on my last jaunt for Uncle Sam had me a little rattled. Nothing serious, just peace of mind. If it makes you feel better, I promise to go back to ignoring your friends.” 

“That would we wonderful.” 

The weirdness didn’t stop there though. 

Logan had a tablet and a laptop, but he rarely touched either. Even his phone was reserved for phone calls only--a habit Veronica wished he’d replace with texting. He played music from the iPod he’d had since 2004 and hadn’t updated since and insisted Veronica manage Google maps on long car drives. 

But in the weeks after Mac’s visit, he would retreat to their room with his phone and remain there for exactly an hour to the minute. Veronica made up excuses to come in and he always acknowledged her when she did, but turned his focus quickly back to the screen in his hands. 

“Cam girls,” Veronica declared when he crashed on the couch after one of the hour long sessions. 

“Considering a change in career?” he asked, “I don’t think our WiFi signal is strong enough.” 

“And I don’t think I can compete with whoever is keeping your attention,” Veronica allowed. 

He turned to her and grinned. “Please, unpack your theory. I know you’re dying to.” 

Veronica straightened out her tank top and sat up, “Your attention please,” she requested, “For the past three weeks you have left your station at my side to sit on your phone from 1 to 2 on Tuesdays, 6-7 on Wednesdays and 4:30 to 5:30 on Fridays. Whoever is blessing you with her bosom sure is timely.” 

Logan hummed. “Over ten years of private investigation, a law degree, and a psych degree and you think that I have three hourly standing appointments with a camgirl. That, to you, is more likely to the most obvious alternatives.” 

“What is the most obvious alternative?” 

He lay back on the couch and stared at the ceiling. “Do you honestly think I’m hitting up a punctual camgirl? Check my credit card statement then, if you haven’t already.” 

She had. 

It’s not that she really thought he was cheating on her, and she’d gotten used enough to living with a military man to know there were things that he had to keep from her. But it was unusual enough to make her suspicious. After that conversation, Logan switched around his routine times of retreat and cloaked them by taking Pony for walks. Veronica tailed him a few times and determined that he was still staring at his phone the whole time, sometimes typing for as long as five minutes, but looking at it for the most part. 

It was an oddity that after years of living with Logan’s growing predictably set her on edge. 

Logan wasn’t exactly the most normal partner Veronica had ever had. The military had mechanized the unpredictable impulsivity out of him. His oddities continued, though they were easier to predict now. 

4:00 AM wakeups were new, but listening to Weird Al on his old iHome while meticulously peeling fruit in the kitchen was not. Veronica once commented that she was surprised he even knew how to carve fruit having grown up with no less than three full-time domestic servants on staff at all times. He just raised his eyebrows and shed a peach from its pit with one hand. “It’s the closest I can get to skinning someone alive,” he said in a jovial voice. 

Sometimes she got up and cajoled him into playing someone that they hadn’t heard for the first time in 2001, but most mornings she skimmed consciousness a few minutes when the music turned on before falling back asleep. 

One morning Veronica snapped to full alertness. It took only a few seconds for her to identify that she woke up because there was a new sound coming from the kitchen. It only took a few more to identify that it was someone speaking and it did not sound like Logan. 

They both had guns and even though she knew the statistics and Logan’s feelings about it, it would have taken her too many precious seconds to retrieve it if she didn’t keep hers in her nightstand. It’s not like they had a three-year-old running around the house. 

She took two steps out of the bedroom, gun half raised at her side. The language was German, she was almost sure. She didn’t know a word of German, but when the voice shifted into laughter before going back to German, she was startled to realize it was Logan. In a split second decision, she reached back into the bedroom and put her gun down before stepping into the kitchen. 

Logan jolted in a way he hadn’t in years. He was wearing white headphones attached to his phone which was facedown on the counter. He held up a finger to her and lifted the microphone closer to his mouth. “Warte ein minute,” he said into the phone, before taking out his headphones addressing her, “Did I wake you up?”

“You speak German.”

“Ja.” 

“You didn’t want to tell me that when I spent a day and a half tracking down that classics professor and paid through the nose for a translator?” Veronica said, like that had anything to do with what was going on now. 

“Not well enough to translate,” Logan amended, “I can go outside it this is keeping you up.” 

“What’s really going to keep me up is the knowledge that my boyfriend is a secret polyglot.” 

Logan stood up and headed for the door. “I’m full of secrets.” He put his headphones back in and as he opened the door, he said, “Wenn du denkst, dass das verrückt ist…” and closed the door behind him. 

Veronica didn’t go back to sleep. She knew there were people who cleaned when their brain was on fire, but that wasn’t her. She went back to the bedroom and turned the safety back on her gun before pulling Logan’s laptop and tablet out. They were covered with a film of dust. Even if the rational part of her piped up that it would be difficult to fake that, she turned them on and checked the search histories. She had an alert on Logan’s bank account already, but there was plenty that could be done without a trace of spending money. 

“I know how to clear my search history,” Logan said. 

He was leaning in the doorway, headphones in his hand. He pointed to the gun still on their dresser. “Planning to off me for waking you up?”

“Can I look at your phone?” she asked without preamble. 

“Veronica--”

“I need this,” she cut him off, “You know I need this.”

“I don’t know that,” he said, carefully setting his phone down on the dresser and sitting at the end of the bed. He didn’t touch his laptop or tablet, probably because he knew that the only activity she could find was from five months ago. “Even if it wasn’t completely insane for you to ask me to do this, I can’t show you my phone. It’s not just my information on there.” 

“You’re not doing military business on your civilian phone,” she said. “If you don’t tell me, you know I’m going to get crazier and just follow you around until I figure it out. I could have found out weeks ago, I’m holding back on your account. But I could go full Veronica on this.” 

Logan snorted and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t show you what’s on my phone. It’s anonymous.” 

“What could be anonymous that you would risk doing on your phone?” 

He shot her an exaggerated exasperated look. “Veronica. You have to be trying to be this obtuse.” 

God fuck him right now. “Obviously I’m an idiot.” 

“Okay. There’s these groups, you see, with steps, for people who have been affected by addiction?” 

Veronica closed her eyes. “You have a drug problem.” 

“I do know you love to think the worst of me, but no. There are groups for children of alcoholics. That’s what I’ve been doing. Not camgirls, not espionage. Meetings. I’d hand you a little pamphlet if I’d ever been to one in person.” 

It wouldn’t be the first time Veronica saw said pamphlets. The second time Mom had tried to get sober, Dad drove her to a church two towns over and walked her into the basement. He ignored her jokes about exorcism, which admittedly dried up when he walked her into a room filled with other kids, folding chairs in a circle and a table with cookies and tidy tri-fold brochures with titles like “Are you troubled by someone’s drinking?” 

She sat through one meeting for her dad’s sake, but made it clear when she got home that it would not be happening again. There was nothing wrong with her that had anything to do with her mom’s drinking. She was fine. 

They didn’t talk about it, but she knew Dad didn’t stop going to meetings. Books and magnets appeared around their house, and his sponsor came around now and again until he moved to Phoenix when Veronica was a sophomore. It seemed like it all stopped around then. 

There was no reason to think he kept going until the summer after high school he mentioned in passing, “You're old enough to go to the adult meetings now.” 

“Is that what they’d calling trips to the strip club these days?” she said. 

Dad rolled on like she hadn’t said anything, “I could tell you which meetings I go to, if you want to avoid being in the same one as me.” 

“No need,” she said, and changed the topic when he tried to press. 

The correct emotion in this moment probably shouldn’t be betrayal. It also probably shouldn’t be disappointment. She should be proud of Logan, not annoyed. This was what adults did, right? They identified where their childhood had screwed them up and took steps to try to fix it. 

“They have digital meetings?” 

Taking that as an invitation, Logan scooched up next to her on the bed and carefully put an arm around her. “It’s amazing what’s possible with technology these days.” 

“You know there are five meetings spitting distance from here. Afraid you’ll burn up if you enter a church?” 

“That concern is secondary to seeing ‘Son of a movie star cries about finding movie star Lynn Echolls in a pile of her own vomit’ on some magazine the next day.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Veronica said, leaning her head on his shoulder, “at this point in your life, it would be ‘Three-time murder suspect’ not ‘son of a movie star.’” 

“It’s always going to be ‘son of a movie star.’”

He was probably right. “So, the extra security on your phone.” 

“Mac did her magic to make sure my IP and phone number couldn’t be tracked.” 

“And the meetings in German?”

“More a timezone thing than anything else.” 

She considered carefully what she was going to say next. They’d both been through more than most people go through in their lifetime by the time they were seventeen. She knew--mostly from Lilly--that Logan’s mother was an alcoholic, and she knew that he knew about her mom. But they’d never sat cross-legged on the carpet and exchanged stories about Mom driving home drunk from a 4:00 soccer practice, or pulling out the recycling to count bottles. 

They had more relevant things to talk about. More pressing things. 

“Is it a big deal in your life though?” she asked, “You’re dedicating four hours a week on this. Is it having enough of an impact on your life to justify the time you’re spending on it?” 

“Well I tried to find an Adult Child of Murderers meeting, but…” he sighed. “Look, you don’t have to get it. I’m trying something. Maybe not feel so out of control all the time.”

Veronica didn’t see how talking to Germans on the phone would help in any way. But she had to allow that it probably wouldn’t hurt, and Logan had clearly put a lot of thought into it. She still had to voice the worst-case scenario. 

“You’re not going to start trying to get me to join in on the fun are you?” 

It was the closest they’d come to talking about having this in common. 

“It’s against one of our traditions,” Logan said, “I’m not going to recruit you.” 

_Our_ traditions. God, he’d really drunk the kool-aid. 

“You can talk to me, you know,” she said, “if the Germans aren’t picking up.” 

“ _Ja_ ,” he said, “you’ll have to learn the language though, I don’t know how to emote in English.” 

“Me neither.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I guess in the book canon Logan has a drug problem but I haven't read them so it doesn't count. Thank you for reading!


End file.
